


Ache

by trapsintheforest



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (not between Hannibal and Will), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Foster Family, Bedelia is Will's foster parent, Bottom Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter is a Cannibal, Infidelity, M/M, Morally Ambiguous Character, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Older Man/Younger Man, Psychoanalysis, Step-parent Hannibal Lecter, Stepfather/step-son relationship, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Voyeurism, Will is 18
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:47:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29473467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trapsintheforest/pseuds/trapsintheforest
Summary: Hannibal Lecter has a perfect (though cold) House of Cards type relationship with Bedelia, but takes an inappropriate interest in her impossibly observant foster son Will.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emungere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emungere/gifts).



It was critical that I stop thinking about him. Especially his arms, which were the color of lightly toasted marshmallows. At dinner, when he asked me about my studies, I could only wonder, crudely, if his dick was as veiny as his arms. 

The worst part, was I had this deep and sickly rooted suspicion that this man, the husband of my mother, was actually an active serial killer in the Chesapeake area. However, because I often convinced myself I was mad, I did not let my paranoia sway me from my attraction. 

At the same time, if he could hear my thoughts he probably would question whether my attraction and my paranoia were conjoined: my lust was somehow based upon this idea that he was the Chesapeake Ripper. That I wanted to be fucked by a murderer. He was after all, a psychiatrist. 

I wanted to throw him off, just once, because he was so infuriatingly serene in the way he flustered me and probably other people. Though I could not, or did not, want to imagine his warm amusement with them; the chord of fondness that stretched between us was not for them. I was used to disappointing men, my father chief among them, but I did not want to count Hannibal Lecter among the disappointing ones. He was too refined. I believed he could show me something that I had never seen before. 

It was the thought that he should show me he should not disappoint me that propelled me to look into their bedroom when I was certain they were intimate. 

My mother Bedelia had been fostering me for about three and a half years, ever since I turned fifteen. We had a sort of unspoken agreement- she utilized me for my mind, published research on my empathy disorder as if I was her patient. In turn, I had access to all her resources. When I asked for something I needed, she always gave it as long as it was beneficial to her own reputation as a parent, and within reason (no drugs, no indulgent spoiling, etc.). That was as far as our allegiances extended to each other. 

I suppose the greatest reason I stuck around instead of creating a dramatic exit like I usually did with awful fosters was the library. Bedelia had inherited it from her father. It was vast, yet cramped, disorganized to the point where it took great difficulty to step through and around massive piles of literature in the midst of tiny corridors; the perfect place to get lost in, which was why I loved it. 

After a certain point, I began to wonder if that was the reason Dr. Lecter stuck around too. I kept finding him in there unexpectedly. 

“If you like that, I believe you would find Zizek’s ‘The Uncanny’ a most satisfying read,” he said to me the first time. 

I yelped and dropped my glasses. 

“I apologize for startling you. Your mother wanted me to fetch you for dinner.”

I looked at him. He reminded me greatly of that one Picasso painting, the one with the woman in the rocking chair with black coal eyes and a mouth made of two lines-I suppose it was the top lip especially, which curved over the bottom in a severe V. 

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.” Though I set the book aside out of politeness and made the mistake of meeting his gaze. I don’t think either of us was prepared for me to find something there in his eyes, but I did. 

“Are you always amused?” 

“I beg your pardon?” The false ignorance in his voice only pushed me to double down. 

“Amused,” I said. “It seems as if you are often amused even when there is no reason to be. There’s this, kind of.. I dunno, secret irony surrounding you. Something which you cultivate.” 

This was usually the point at which most people balked and either insisted I was rude, on the spectrum, or holding a mysterious grudge. Regardless of how on the nose my intuition could be, my observations were not frequently well received by their subjects. 

“What makes you think so?”

“Dr. Lecter..” I fought to keep myself immune from his contagious crinkling smirk, “Maybe it’s that twinkle in your eye.”

“Perhaps, Will, I simply know something that you don’t know,” He said coyly. It was not the first conversation I had ever had with him, but it was the first one worth remembering. 

He found me again a couple days later, coincidentally reading the book he had suggested, which I begrudgingly admitted was incredibly interesting to me. Of course I would not tell him that. 

“I’m happy you took my advice to heart,” he said. It was infuriating how he managed to still look charming in the maroon paisley monstrosity he called a suit. 

“I happened to find it in the same section,” I lied. “I suppose it’s not bad so far.”

“And what are your thoughts?”

I considered for a minute, whether to give him a real answer. He was not a normal man, that much was clear, but I did not know what kind of strange he was, and what I could share with him without offending delicate sensibilities. I didn’t want to get thrown out of another foster home by coming off as morbid or a bit deranged. To be blunt, Bedelia Du Maurier was rich- and I knew what it was like not to be. I had opportunities here. I had, if nothing else, the library. It would be stupid to trust the man that had Bedelia’s ear with my dark secrets. Yet something compelled me in this instance to give in to the rare impulse of being myself. 

“I understand what he means by this other, the horror of the unknown. I see it everywhere I look. But I don’t feel repelled. Perhaps I should be,” I said. “ Would make better survival instincts.”

“And how does that make you feel?” 

I scoffed at the obvious psychological tactic. 

“Cliché as it might be," he went on, "it is the question I find most fascinating for what the answer might reveal.” He curled his fingers around the banister, and I had the intrusive thought of how they would feel, flexing inside me. The fact that Dr. Lecter could snap my neck with his bare hands almost casually, like turning off a faucet, should not have been as arousing as it was, instead of frightening. 

“It makes me feel...a quiet sense of power," I said. 

He always managed to find me, regardless of what alcove or cranny I selected as my spot to read in isolation. Another one of his games, pretending to run into me accidentally though we both knew he was seeking me, and I was hiding. I chose cleverer and cleverer places, using the ladders to get far up in the dusty shelves. 

“Are you a bloodhound?” I asked him once mockingly, after he found me in less than four minutes of arriving in the library. When his face froze so beautifully taken aback in that instant, I uncovered the secret of his extraordinary sense of smell. 

It was the same night I found the peephole in the presidential autobiography section. I had fallen asleep in the dankest corner of the second floor-balcony level of the library, and woke up to the sound of panting and the shaking of the shelves around me. 

Following the source of the noise, I came upon the grubby hole in the wall where if I pressed my eye up to the cracks, I could see into Bedelia’s bedroom. Dark red bed, the color of valentine’s day boxes. Hannibal taking her slowly from behind; sweaty, rippling. I spied for a long time before feeling appropriately perverted by my actions. 

This did not stop me from bringing myself off that night to the fantasy of Dr Lecter’s rolling hips, of being stuffed full. He was completely silent as a lover with Bedelia, who now and again emitted high pitched feline keens that made me itch to frankly drag her off his dick because it irritated the hell out of me, and made it difficult to masturbate. In my fantasies I imagined him deeply groaning, murmuring my name, unable to keep quiet as long as he was inside me. 

They always used a condom. It seemed like more of a preference than a necessity as Bedelia I knew had her tubes tied and (as far as I knew) they had been fucking only each other for years. I postulated that the latex barrier made it easier for both of them to perfect that image of the clinically distant, yet picture perfect power couple. 

In my fantasies, the good doctor never wore a condom, because I wanted to feel him. He would act as if he was being seduced into it, but we would both know he was actually a sick fuck underneath all the the layers of pretension which concealed it. 

No one acknowledged the tension between Dr. Lecter and I. In fact, it pleased Bedelia that we seemed to get along. At the same time, he continued to find me in the library and allow for -if not outright instigate- very cryptic conversations. At night I watched their love making covetously through the peephole in the library wall, felt Teddy Roosevelt’s stern eyes on me to the point I turned his biography around out of shame. 

In retrospect, I should have been more careful and tacked something over the peep hole, like a poster or picture. Even gum would have saved me from Hannibal Lecter. 

The night everything changed I naively watched him take her from behind. I stroked myself. He was fucking her harder than he usually did, and I could tell she was into it but also a bit miffed. I watched him reach his climax -this time without all the usual pomp and circumstance designed to charm his partner. Unexpectedly, in the seconds before he came, he snapped his gaze directly at the peep hole. Our eyes met, though he could not see me. They bored into mine, and he snarled, fucked her harder than I had ever seen him do it. She moaned. I gasped, ducked away from the wall, and attempted to flee the scene. He knew, I said to myself. He must know. This night was a performance, a demonstration of what it would be like for me, his voyeur, if I were to be in Bedelia’s place. I shuddered, but not with fear, as I clambered down the ladders like a rapid spider. I didn’t know what would happen but I knew I needed to be in my own bed before Dr. Lecter found me. 

Otherwise, he would catch me.


	2. Chapter 2

All I needed to do was turn the corner, I told myself. Turn the corner, then down the stairs to my bedroom and I would be off- scott free. Even if I wasn’t in my room, he could not confront me with any damning proof unless he found me in the library, which was where the peephole was. I slid down the last ladder, and caught my breath with a thud.

There was, suddenly, a warm grip on the back of my neck. 

“Will..” Dr. Lecter said. 

“You didn’t finish.” I gloated at my own double entendre. 

I turned and we regarded each other. Hannibal was wearing only his argyle silk pajama bottoms (argyle!), and his chest was still dewy with perspiration, though he didn’t seem out of breath. 

“I was saying,” he replied coolly, “that I wonder if it would be prudent to re-plaster some of the ceilings and walls in the library. I noticed the other day the cracking in some places. What do you think?”

Clearly he underestimated the amount of fucks I gave. “Sounds like a good idea,” I said. Then, because I was annoyed:“In one area, I could actually see straight into your bedroom.”

“Oh, really,” he said, eyes twinkling at an alarming rate. “I hope you didn’t witness anything untoward.”

“It wouldn’t be possible to.” I muttered under my breath. Their sex was vanilla as hell.

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck when he laughed openly; flashing teeth. 

“You seem disappointed,” he said. 

“Well I’m often disappointed by what’s disappointing.”

“Disappointment is perhaps the most disappointing emotion.”

Well fuck; thank you, Confucius.

He stepped closer. “How often is it that you do something with the disappointment that you experience, Will?”

This was the moment that I realized our conversations often appeared to run on two distinct tracks. It was as if each of us on our own were used to speaking to other people in a particular way: with a personal underlayer of meaning that only we, ourselves, could detect. The development of this underlayer allowed us enough room to be ourselves yet present as not ourselves. It gave me, for instance, the ability to laugh at nightmares. Perhaps Dr. Lecter came out of the womb laughing. I wouldn’t be surprised. 

The game changed that first night in the library; when we learned we could overhear each other’s underselves. It was both disconcerting and exhilarating to find myself exposed for the first time. I wondered if it was like that for him too. 

I noticed, then, with a start, the press of his gentle but insisting fingers on my back, the shadow over my face where his own covered all the light above and in front of my eyes. He descended. I was about to be devoured, I thought inanely. There would be nothing left. 

“Hannibal?” Bedelia’s voice called from the stairs below us.

I blinked and Dr. Lecter was already half-away across the floor, peering at some random seafaring encyclopedia with the utmost interest. 

“There you are.” Bedelia entered the library, swaddled in a sky blue robe. She sounded exasperated. I couldn’t blame her. I wonder if he would still finish her after this. He was probably very good with his tongue. Maybe he would turn on his side and leave her wanting. 

“I was waiting for you.”

“Jack called.” Hannibal lied smoothly. “I find that your library boasts the most satisfactory reception out of all the rooms in the house. Our angel killer has a new disciple. “

“How awful.” 

“Indeed.”

Neither one of them seemed particularly concerned by these events, however. I wondered if I could slip away unnoticed. 

“Will? You haven’t been bothering Dr. Lecter, have you?” Bedelia suddenly pivoted in my direction. Her tone was playful, but I studied the carpet instead of looking back at her. My face burned.

“Not at all,” Hannibal cut in. “We were simply chatting for a moment about Byzantine fishing techniques.”

“I see,” said Bedelia. She placed one manicured hand on Dr. Lecter’s forearm to whisk him away. 

\-------------------

At breakfast the next morning, Bedelia asked me what was so interesting about the Byzantine period. I had a hunch that she would inquire. She would have suspicions about Dr. Lecter and I- and a lack of self-doubt which would enable her to pursue them.

I know you, I thought. I know all of you. 

“Fire-fishing,” I said. “Using sulfuric fire to attract fish. Apparently it was a common ancient practice.”

Dr. Lecter’s lip twitched as he served us our protein scramble. 

\--------------------------------------------

I suppose I first started suspecting Hannibal Lecter of hiding his true identity as the Chesapeake Ripper the first night I met him. Of course, I thought I was mad for thinking it, but I did all the same; in abject moments: the knife singing in his hand, as he diced raw onion. How he smiled at our very first bite. More than anything else, his terrible, completely unnecessary puns. I don’t think I would have gotten it without all the puns. 

At the same time, I didn’t know if he knew that I knew. (That he knew that I knew that he knew)

I thought about it every time I chewed, kept my eyes fixed on the table so he wouldn’t catch me knowing him.


End file.
